Enter Rat Park at your own risk. Lose the cage. Find yourself. An L.A. power couple orders an A.I. sex droid to escape their marital prison. What happens to them could happen to you. With his fourth novel, Adam Novak shows us how it takes a village of automatons to augment your humanity, feed your deceptive compulsive sexual addiction, and forget why you ever got married in the first place.
Why a book on John O’Brien? This idea had its genesis when I was talking to John’s mother, Judith O’Brien, after a reading by Erin O’Brien when she released her book The Irish Hungarian Guide to The Domestic Arts at a gallery located in Lakewood, Ohio (John’s hometown). It was a brief conversation with Judith, I told her Leaving Las Vegas is a book that had a tremendous impact on me, and I spent several minutes explaining why. Judith, or as I called her then, the only time I’ve met her up to the time of this writing, Mrs. O’Brien, was so appreciative that I took the time to speak with her about this but I wasn’t quite sure if she thought I was just nice or if she understood the weight, the gravity, the impact that this novel could have in the hands of the right reader. The mental template for this project is Henry Miller’s Time of The Assassin. As far as structures, if I want to talk about homecoming themes, from Hamlet to Pinter’s The Homecoming, there is also the template of Homer’s The Odyssey. If there’s a treatise of one writer discussing another, where a reader…
“Had I mentioned the real intention behind my return home—eating myself to death—I’m pretty sure my grandmother’s reaction may have been more subdued…” So begins Teddy Rawski’s journey to his hometown of Buffalo, and to the end of the night. An obsessive eater, itinerant dreamer, half-hopeful novelist, reluctant food journalist, and a pathological football lunatic, Teddy ponders nascent adulthood’s quandaries on the road, over too many drinks and a beleaguered stomach. Set against the big-shouldered indifference of his present Chicago, between scattered half-stabs at professionalism, an unamused editor, unpolished manuscript, and a sputtering late-20’s romance, Teddy wonders on a last ditch trip. For an assignment, maybe. To end it all, possibly. But also for a check on the tattered family he left behind, and the broken Buffalo Bills responsible for all life failures. This is a story of the busted-gut death of a childhood, any idealism, all good health. Rife with chicken wings, pizza, and Proust, it is a reflection on football and futility, colored by a throat-punching uncle, slice-counting brother, and a smattering of ghosts and interior dialogue diarrhea. Spend It All is an after-hours vomitorium of fandom and frustration, a last-call fever dream of ideas and appetites. Todd…
